


Reunion

by duc



Series: The Overprotective Med Team [2]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Anakin Lives AU, Gen, Redeemed!Anakin - Freeform, The Overprotective Med Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 07:53:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15138569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/duc/pseuds/duc
Summary: Anakin is not what the Home 1 med team was expecting : the droid editionOr, when Commander Skywalker brings a dying Darth Vader to the Alliance after the battle of Endor, Artoo has the chance to reunite with an old friend.





	Reunion

**Author's Note:**

> This take place in what I call The Overprotective Med Team AU, where basically, Anakin took longer to die after chucking Palpatine down the elevator shaft, and Luke had the time to bring him to the Alliance fleet, where he was taken to the medbay and stabilized. 
> 
> Medical first agreed to treat him because space Hippocratic oath, then they took one good look at the suit (thereafter nicknamed the Suit of Horrors or the Malpractice suit) and went WTF?!
> 
> Never had any of them seen such a horrific amalgam of medical neglect and torture. From then on they stoped just keeping him alive and went on to start fixing and replacing everything. Because now it was a matter of professional pride because That Thing was an _insult_ to the medical profession and by all the gods, they were going to give him Proper Medical Care, damn it. Which snowballed into genuine protectiveness, because yes he was a mass murderer, but he had been through a lot ok?

Artoo's first meeting with  ~~Vader~~  Anakin Skywalker was.... not what the Alliance expected. No one Kenig could get his hands on even knew why and how the droid had gotten into the very secure area of medbay where they stashed the Sith Lord. The best explanation he got was Princess Leia telling him that R2D2 was devoted to Commander Skywalker and often followed him around but even she was somewhat mystified as to why he would be interested in the older Skywalker.

So when the little battered astromech wheeled straight toward Vader and jammed his pincer into his side, whistling and beeping up a storm, everyone was stunned. And then terrified. 

Heavily wounded or not, Kenig did not for one second believe Vader was harmless and he had visions of the droid's blue and white barrel body being tossed into the opposite wall. But Vader did no such thing. Vader did not do much of anything. 

A raspy "Well, clearly I wasn't." was his only response to R2D2's opening salvo. After that he offered a few "Yes, I know." or "I'm sorry." when there was a lull in what sounded like an epic rant in Binari but he barely tried to get out of the way of R2D2's pincer. 

Eventually the little astromech ran out of steam and rolled out of the room without so much as a backward glance. The swish of the door closing seemed to break the spell that had been holding everyone else frozen in shock. Kenig looked around, making eye contact with his assistant Tir-am and the 2-1B unit. 

"What was  _that_?" he asked, more to commiserate on a surreal experience than expecting an answer. 

The 2-1B whirred. "It appears that the two were previously acquainted."

***

Once the shock of the encounter wore off, and once Kenig had filed it in its proper place in his "List of shit, I, in a million years, would not have expected of Darth Vader" mental file. Kenig foolishly considered the matter close and put it out of his mind. He had a medical wing to run. He was too busy to spend all his time wondering about Sith Lords, as intriguing as this one proved to be.  

He was in his closet of an office, trying to sort out supply requisitions - A task that was much easier than it had been before Endor and their second big victory against the Empire, but was still not as straightforward as he would like it to be, and as such commended all his attention - when one of his med tech bust into the room.

"Healer Kenig!" Dreiss said in a shouted whisper. "You gotta see this!"

"It's Anakin," she added when he didn't look inclined to put down his datapad. 

That got him up, out if his office and into the corridor fast. "What happened?" he asked. Vader trouble could mean anything. It could mean he had turned on them and gotten violent, thought Kenig thought it less and less likely everyday. It could mean someone in the Alliance had tried to harm him, Kenig knew there were pockets of resentments thorough the fleet. Lastly, it could mean his health had taken a sudden turn for the worst. All of those scenarios swirled in his head in the few seconds it took Dreiss to answer him. 

"Oh no, no, no," she said, having seen the look on his face. "No. It's Artoo,"

"Who?"

"Artoo Deetoo. Commander Skywalker's astromech?" she said to jog his memory. "It looks like he's buried the hatchet. Here, look." 

She pointed. The door to Skywalker's room was already open, the guard stationed there was not scanning the coridor like he was supposed to, he had one hand on the door jam was was looking inside with just his head poking out. Eran was standing behind him, in the same position, but coming up a head shorter. They looked like children spying in on their parents. For lack of a better option, Kenig cautiously joined them and peered into the room too. 

It took a moment for his eyes to find them. Skywalker was not on his bed -  _he wasn't supposed to be out of bed unsupervised yet._  A part of Kenig's mind supplied - but sitting on the floor next to it, back resting on the wall. R2D2 was right against his side, almost blocking him from view and there were a handfull of tools, some Kenig recognized, some that had to have come from the hangar, stewn in a semi circle around them.

Kenig wasn't sure he wanted to know how Vader had gotten down - or gotten to the cabinets on the other side of the room to get he vibroscalpel and tweezers he could see on the floor. They had removed his prosthetic legs when they had seen how shoddy they were, and hadn't installed the new ones in yet. They hadn't replaced the cut off prosthetic arm he had come in with either. They had been focused on keeping him alive first, and then on fixing his sad excuse for life support. 

The panel of his new respirator was popped open, and the droid was poking and whistling at it. 

Vader for his part, had a small delicate cloth prob in his remaining hand and he was running it carefully into the cracks of the droid's dome. 

Kenig blinked. The image before him stayed the same.

"What in the galaxy?!" he told Dreiss.

"I found them like that when I went in for my check," she whispered back.

"SHHHHH!" Eran hissed.

In front of them, Vader grumbled, his prob stuck on an invisible object it couldn't dislodge. Without any other action on his part, and without him taking his eyes off the droid, a long slim pick rose into the air and inserted itself into the crack on the other side of the probe and in short order a small piece of debris flew off to land on the white floor. 

Both the man and the droid followed the path of the... rock? and then looked at each other.

"The sand I can understand. You can never get it all out. But rocks? Why do you have rocks in your circuits?" Vader rasped.

In response, R2D2 rocked on his wheels so that the diagnostic arm that was connected to the respirator bumped it. He beeped derisively.

"Point taken," Vader nodded. He leaned to resume his cleaning. 

R2D2 gave a few more beeps and then moved his arm from one slot in the respirator to another. His arm turned one way, then the other. He thrilled softly.

"Maybe," Skywalker answered. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Hmm, no it was better before. Try the other one?"  

_He's playing with the calibration._  Kenig thought. That respirator had been programmed for Skywalker's specific condition. Kenig wasn't an expert, that was Eran, but he could think of dozens of ways the little droid could compromise Skywalker's already fragile lungs. Enough was enough.

"What are you doing?" he boomed in a tone known to send skiving personnel scurrying back to their work and to freeze misbehaving ensigns in their tracks like eopies in headlight.

On a hardened killer and a 30-something year old astromech that had seen better days, it had less of an impact. They didn't jump, they didn't freeze, they merely turned their heads toward him and looked at him quizzically. Kenig wouldn't have thought a man with heavy facial scarring and a droid with no humanoid "face" could give out such a clear "who me?" expression. But they managed it. 

Kenig was never going to get a satisfying explanation for this, was he?

 

****

A days, 4 separate interviews - With Anakin Skywalker, with Commander Luke Skywalker, with Agent Ahsoka Tano and with Princess Leia - and a great deal of meandering through both the Clone Wars AND the NAboo-Trade Federation crisis, Kenig did in fact get an explanation. It was thorough, he had no reason to think it was anything but genuine, but he didn't know if it could be called satisfying per se. 

Darth Vader had been a figure shrouded in mystery for the 20 years he operated as the Emperor's enforcer, but Anakin Skywalker, the man they had found underneath the armor, had been nothing but candid with them so far (Kenig blammed shell shock). The problem was Anakin's Skywalker's candor had a way of utterly destroying any and all previous expectation.

Now he just had to get the image of grooming Loth-cats out of his mind. 


End file.
